For Something Simple, Minimal Design Sure Is Complicated

MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design is all about the inventive, expressive ways designers today are using understated graphics. For L’eaundry, a fancy laundry detergent sold from a food cooperative in Hamburg, Korefe design agency used a black-and-white silhouette design to show that this soap is as luxurious as perfume.

Riposte is a women's magazine out of London. The cover design is unusual: it only features type, with a photograph of the "cover girl" on the back page. In the book, Shaz Madani, the art director, explains: "The type-only cover reflects our desire to make sure the women featured are not judged or represented by just
their looks, but instead celebrated for their ideas and achievements. It was a purposeful departure from the image-obsessed magazine world. So its minimal design is more functional than aesthetic, but has become an important part of our visual identity."

Plenty of the work in the book feels like an antidote to some of the hyper, extreme designs we've become used to. The Gentlewoman, a beautiful magazine that launched in 2010, could be seen as a reaction to the exclamatory neon layouts found in other women’s periodicals like Cosmopolitan or Glamour.

Harmonian is a line of food products from Athens, Greece, that come in stark, all-white packaging by the firm Mousegraphics. Cut-outs let consumers see the actual food, letting the product sell itself.

For the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Penguin commissioned Jonathan Barnbrook to reimagine David Pelham's famous cover, featuring a cartoon of a man with a mechanical gear for an eye. Barnbrook put a big orange circle on a white book jacket. It's easy to look at the cover, Tolley says, and criticize it for not being anything more complex than a circle. "If you were given a brief to redesign A Clockwork Orange, the amount of visual references, and the really famous book design that’s been done already---it’s almost an impossible brief," says Stuart Tolley, author of MIN. In this case, simplicity isn't a cop out; it's a high-stakes bet that one orange circle can be the face of an entire novel.

Continuous Tone is a new sound project by London-based creative group Open Editions. These are compositions of environmental sounds recorded in the French countryside.

New Philosopher is an independent quarterly magazine from Australia. It covers relatively abstract topics, like the mind, the self, health, growth or happiness. The geometric covers help to illustrate those ideas specifically, but in a way that could be understood across cultures.

City by Landscape is a series of essays about the German architect Rainer Schmidt. The book's cover features little more than a scattering of sans serif letters, but does so in an artfully arranged way.

One section of MIN is devoted to production, in which the character of the work comes from the tactile quality of print, rather than graphic design elements. Imprimerie du Marais, a Parisian printing house, created a series of distinct notebooks by using texture, rather than color or shapes.

Imprimerie du Marais's notebooks, all stacked together in one---yes---simple box.

For the Pet Shop Boys's 12th studio album, London design studio Farrow created a zig-zag design that hints at the Electric album title and reflects the band’s dance- orientated approach to music production.

This design approach even works on mundane objects. The Japanese brand Askul carries batteries with no design other than a color and a number that connotes the size.

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There’s a rumor going around about minimal graphic design. “A lot of people say it’s really easy,” says Stuart Tolley, who runs a design studio in Brighton, England, called Transmission. “A lot of people say you just rely on Helvetica, or white space. And I completely disagree.”

Thames & Hudson

Perhaps you know, or are, one of these people who feels fatigued by how trendy it’s become for companies to use stripped down design to convey friendliness, or force icon status. But minimal design, as Tolley sees it, isn’t simply a matter of ‘less stuff.’ It’s an exercise in economy of expression. To argue his point, Tolley wrote a book. MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design is a catalog of branding, packaging, and editorial work. Every entry is understated in style, and was created within the past four years; but the 160 designs featured in the book, available now from Thames & Hudson ($35), vary broadly.

“I wanted to prove that minimal design can be really experimental,” Tolley says. To create the right mix, he self-imposed a few curatorial rules. First, no personal projects. Everything in the book should be representative of work that made it to market. Second, no retro designs. To prove that clean design is fresh and smart, Tolley would need to demonstrate that it has evolved from the 1950s-era Swiss Style that helped make typefaces like Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk popular. The examples Tolley picked fall into one of three stylistic categories: reduction (in which work is stripped down in creative ways), production (in which the character of the work comes from the tactile quality of print, rather than graphic design elements), and geometry (in which shapes feature prominently).

Stuart Tolley

There’s a lot to choose from these days; pared down design is having a moment. “I’ve been looking into why simplicity is becoming quite important,” says Tolley, who has a few theories. “I think a lot of people are inspired by using iPhones and iPads.” There’s also the natural ebb and flow of design trends. Not so long ago, maximalist, ornamental design was the status quo.

Here’s a quick example: in 2011, Warby Parker co-founder Andy Katz-Mayfield had a mediocre shopping experience at a drugstore, while trying to pick up razors. The branding was part of the problem: men’s shaving merchandise tends to come wrapped in extreme, metallic, turbo packaging. The design work could easily be for NASCAR. Not all men identify with this persona, Katz-Mayfield reasoned, so why not create a shaving brand for a more classic sort of gentlemen? Soon after, he and another Warby Parker founder launched Harry’s, a low-frills brand that sells simply shaped razors in simply decorated boxes.

Stuart Tolley

Harry’s isn’t featured in MIN, but it embodies a shift towards palate-cleansing design shared by a range of goods showcased in the book. There’s a line of food products that come in stark, all-white packaging. Cut-outs let consumers see the actual food, letting the product sell itself. The Gentlewoman, a beautiful magazine that launched in 2010, could be seen as an antidote to the exclamatory neon layouts found in other women’s periodicals like Cosmopolitan or Glamour. The Japanese brand Askul even carries batteries with no design other than a color and a number that connotes the size.

That's the look for now. Soon, Tolley says, the tide will turn back. "In the next few years, there will be a more expressive graphic trend that comes up.” In that light, MIN is like a time capsule for this particular era in graphic design—one characterized by an aesthetic that is simultaneously computational and artisanal, and bold in its simplicity.